Visiting with one's ancestors

Just finished Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty. From the blurb:

The passion and violence of the age of exploration and empire come to vivid life in this story of the legendary pirate who took on the greatest military power on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades. Awash with bloody battles, political intrigues, natural disaster, and a cast of characters more compelling, bizarre, and memorable than any found in a Hollywood swashbuckler, Empire of Blue Water brilliantly re-creates the life and times of Henry Morgan and the real pirates of the Caribbean.

Well, yes, on balance.

I first came across Henry Morgan among my first ventures into reading and he has been around in various accounts of history and maritime books I have read over the years. This is the first book I have read which substantially focused on Morgan.

Several glitches: a handful of recognizable errors, several instances of awkward wording, occasional deviations into non-pertinent material. Could have done with a good editor.

That said, lot's of interesting information that was new to me, lots of connections to global events, and a high energy narrative style that keeps you eagerly reading. Glad to have read it and I will keep my eyes open for his other works. Lot's of interesting passages.

The social habits of Spanish royalty.

On the hot days of that spring and summer, as the news of Jamaica's fall made its way to his court, Philip could be found at the Escorial, the palace built by his grandfather on the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama outside of Madrid. Constructed in gratitude for the victory over the French at Saint-Quentin in 1557, it contained art galleries, a library, a college, and a monastery. But Philip was not studying the masterpieces that were hung on the gallery walls, though they were magnificent and featured the faces he knew so well, those of his own family of Hapsburg kings; instead he could be found in the mausoleum, where he'd recently had the bodies of his ancestors brought together and placed in the marble pantheon. Courtiers gossiped about the long hours Philip spent there; he emerged, they reported, with eyes red from weeping. But for Philip, the hours spent alone in the dark, cool tomb were his new pleasure. "I saw the corpse of the Emperor, whose body, although he had been dead ninety-six years, is still perfect," he wrote to a friend, "and by this it may be seen how richly the Lord has repaid him for his efforts in favour of his faith whilst he lived." Still, the bodies of his illustrious dead comforted him less than one empty space; he spent hour after solitary hour kneeling on the stone floors, staring into the slot where his own body would lie. "It helped me much," he admitted. How he envied the dead, who could not be humiliated by events and whose bodies had ceased to rebel against them. How, in his quiet moments, he wished to join them.